The Danish Girl

by David Ebershoff

  CHAPTER Six

  That summer, the dealer who sold Einar’s work agreed to display ten of Greta’s paintings for two weeks. Einar arranged it, requesting the favor—My wife is becoming frustrated, he began in a letter to Herr Rasmussen—on a sheet of letterhead, though Greta wasn’t supposed to know about that. Regretfully, she unsealed the letter Einar asked her to post, using a teakettle and a fingernail—for no good reason, really, except that sometimes Greta became overwhelmed with a curiosity about her husband and what he did when he was away from her: what he was reading, where he ate his lunch, to whom he spoke and about what. It’s not because I’m jealous, Greta told herself, delicately resealing the envelope. No, it’s simply because I’m in love.

  Rasmussen was bald, with Chinese-shaped eyes, a widower. He lived with his two children in an apartment near Amalienborg. When he said he ’d hang her most recent paintings, Greta was tempted to say she didn’t want his help. Then she thought about it and realized she did. To Einar she coyly said, “I’m not sure whether you spoke to Rasmussen or not. But thankfully he’s come around.”

  At a furniture store on Ravnsborggade she bought ten chairs and re-tacked their cushions in red damask. The chairs she placed in front of each painting at the gallery. “For reflection,” she suggested to Rasmussen, arranging them just so. Then she wrote every European newspaper editor on the list Einar had put together over the years. The invitation announced an important debut—words Greta had trouble putting down, so boastful they seemed, so transactional, but she went ahead, at Einar’s urging. “If that’s what it takes,” she said. She hand-delivered the invitation to the offices of Berlingske Tidende, Nationaltidende , and Politiken, where a clerk in a little gray cap turned her away with a sneer.

  Greta’s paintings were oversized and glossy with a shellacking process she created from varnish. They were so shiny and hard you could clean them like windows. The few critics who came to the gallery picked their way around the red damask chairs and ate the honey crackers Greta had set out in a silver dish. She escorted the critics, whose little notepads remained open and disturbingly blank. “This one is Anna Fonsmark. You know, the mezzo-soprano,” Greta would say. “The trouble I had getting her to pose!” Or, “He’s the furrier to the king. Did you notice the wreath of minks in the corner, symbolizing his trade?” When she said things like that she regretted them immediately; the crassness of her comments would ring in the air as if it were echoing off the shellacked paintings. She would think of her mother, and Greta would blush. But sometimes Greta was filled with too much immediate energy to stop and think and plan and plot. The energy was the fluid running up and down her Western spine.

  She had to admit to herself that some of the critics had come only because she was Einar Wegener’s wife. “How’s Einar’s work coming along?” a few would ask. “When can we expect his next show?” One critic came because she was a Californian and he wanted to hear about the plein-air painters working there—as if Greta might know anything at all about the bearded men mixing their paints in the startling sunlight of Laguna Niguel.

  The gallery on Krystalgade was cramped and, in the heat wave that coincided with her exhibition, smelled of the cheese shop next door. Greta worried that the odor of fontina would settle into her canvases, but Einar told her it was impossible, not with the shellac. “They’re impenetrable,” he remarked of her paintings, which sounded—once it was said, hovering between the two of them like a bat—unkind.

  The next day, when Greta returned to the apartment, she found Lili crocheting a hair net, the needles clicking in her lap. Neither Einar nor Greta ever figured out the origins of Lili’s bloody nose at the Artists Ball. But about a month after, her nose began to bleed again, a couple of warm red bursts over the course of three days in July. Einar said it was nothing, but Greta worried, like a mother watching a son’s cough. Recently, in the middle of the night, Greta had begun to climb out of bed and go to her easel to paint an ashen Lili collapsing in Henrik’s arms. The painting was large, nearly life-size, and more real, with its bright colors and flat shapes, than Greta’s memory of Lili bleeding outside the Artists Ball. In the slanting background was the fountain with the spewing dragons, and the bronze Viking lurblowers. A frail Lili filled the painting, a man’s arms around her, his hair falling into her face. She would never forget the sight of it, Greta told herself as she painted, the climbing mix of horror and confusion and outrage still palpable on the knuckles of her spine. She knew something had changed.

  “Have you been here long?” Greta now asked Lili.

  “Less than an hour.” The needles continued to click in her lap. “I went out. I walked through Kongens Have and crocheted on a bench. Have you seen the roses yet?”

  “Do you think it’s a good idea? For you to be outside? All alone?”

  “I wasn’t alone,” Lili said. “Henrik met me. He met me on the bench.”

  “Henrik,” Greta said. “I see.” Through the corner of her eye, Greta studied her husband. She had no idea what he wanted from this, from Lili, and yet there he was, dressed in a brown skirt and a white blouse with capped sleeves and the old-fashioned shoes with the pewter buckles she had given him that first day. Yes, there he was. A vague regret filled Greta’s throat: she wished she were both more and less involved in the comings and goings of Lili. Greta realized she would never know what exactly was the right thing for her to do.

  “How is the fish painter?” Greta asked.

  Lili sat forward in her chair and began to tell the story of Henrik’s recent trip to New York, where he dined with Mrs. Rockefeller. “He’s becoming an important painter,” Lili went on, describing the people in the art world who were talking about Henrik. “Did you know he’s an orphan?” Lili said, describing his youth as a sailor’s apprentice on a schooner that fished the North Sea. Lili then reported that Henrik had declared, on the bench in Kongens Have in front of the boxhedge, that he ’d never met a girl like Lili.

  “It’s clear he’s taken by you.” Greta could see the heat in Lili’s face. Greta had just returned from an uneventful day at the gallery, her ten paintings all on the wall and unsold. Now all of this—the sight of her husband in the plain brown skirt; the story of Henrik receiving an invitation to dine with Mrs. Rockefeller at the National Arts Club on Gramercy Park; the strange thought of Lili and Henrik on a public bench in the shadow of Rosenborg Slot’s turrets—caught up with her. Greta suddenly asked, “Tell me, Lili. Have you ever kissed a man?”

  Lili stopped, her lace limp in her lap.

  It was almost as if the question had tumbled with its own will out of Greta’s mouth. She had never wondered about this before, because Einar had always been sexually awkward and without initiative. It seemed impossible to Greta that he would have ever pursued such a foreign longing. Why, without her, Einar would never have found Lili. “Would Henrik be the first?” Greta said. “The first to kiss you?”

  Lili thought about this, her brow bunching up. Through the floorboards came the potato-vodka voice of the sailor. “Don’t lie to me!” he was yelling. “I can tell when you’re lying to me.”

  “In Bluetooth,” Lili began, “there was a boy named Hans.” It was the first Greta had heard of Hans. Lili spoke of him ecstatically, with her fingers pressed together and held up in the air. It was as if she were in a trance as she told Greta of Hans’s climbing tricks on the ancient oak, of his pebbly little voice, of his submarine-shaped kite sinking into the bog.

  “And you haven’t heard from him since?” Greta asked.

  “I understand he’s moved to Paris,” Lili said, resuming her crocheting. “He’s an art dealer, but that’s all I know. Deals in art for Americans.” Then she rose and went into the bedroom, where Edvard IV was growling in his sleep, and shut the door. An hour later, when Einar emerged, it was as if Lili had never been there. Except for the scent of mint and milk, it was as if she didn’t really exist at all.

  By the end of the two weeks none of Greta’s paintings ha
d sold. She could no longer blame her lack of success on the economy, what with the Great War seven years in the past and the Danish economy chugging and panting with growth and speculation. But the failed show didn’t surprise her. Since they had married, Einar’s reputation had overshadowed hers. His little dark paintings of moors and storms—really, some were no more than gray paint on black—earned more and more kroner each year. Meanwhile Greta sold nothing but the drab commissions of corporate directors who refused to crack a smile. The more personal portraits she painted—of Anna, of the blind woman at the gate of Tivoli, and now of Lili—went unnoticed. After all, who would buy Greta’s work over Einar’s, the bright, bold American’s over the subtle, cozy Dane’s? What critic in all of Denmark, where artistic styles from the nineteenth century were still considered new and questionable, would dare praise her style over his? This was how Greta felt; even Einar, when prodded, admitted it might be true. “I hate feeling like this,” she would sometimes say, her cheeks mumpy with an envy that could not be dismissed as petty.

  One painting, however, drew some interest. It was a triptych, painted on hinged boards. Greta had started it the day after the ball at Rådhuset. It was three views of a girl’s head at full scale: a girl removed in thought, her eyelids tired and red; a girl white with fear, her cheek hollow; a girl overly excited, her hair slipping from its clip, her lip dewy. Greta had used a fine rabbit’s-hair brush and egg tempera, which gave the girl’s skin a translucence, a nightworm’s glow. On this one painting, she decided not to apply the shellac. Standing in front of it, one or two critics withdrew their pencils from their breast pockets. Greta’s heart began to beat against her ribs as she heard the lead tips scraping against the notepads. One critic cleared his throat; a second, a Frenchman with a little gray wart on the rim of his eye, said to Greta, “This one yours as well?”

  But the painting, called Lili Thrice, could not rescue the show. Rasmussen, a short man who had recently sailed to New York to swap paintings by Hammershøi and Krøyer for shares in the steel companies of Pennsylvania, crated up Greta’s portraits for return. “I’ll keep the one of the girl for consignment,” he said, logging it into his books.

  It was several weeks later that the clipping from a Parisian art journal arrived in the mail, in care of Rasmussen’s gallery. The article was a summary of Scandinavian modern art; buried in the paragraphs on Denmark’s most talented was a brief mention—most people probably never even saw it—of Greta. “A wild and rhapsodic imagination,” it said of Greta. “Her painting of a young girl named Lili would be frightening if it wasn’t so beautiful.” The review said nothing else. It was as cursory as surveys tend to be. Rasmussen had forwarded the clipping to Greta, who read it with a mixture of feeling she couldn’t articulate to anyone: to her, even more startling than the praise was the absence of Einar’s name. Danish art was summed up, and Einar hovered nowhere. She tucked the clipping into a drawer in the pickled-ash wardrobe. It went beneath the sepia prints of Teddy and the letters from her father in Pasadena describing the orange harvest, the coyote hunts, and the society of lady painters in Santa Monica she could join if she ever decided to leave Denmark for good. Greta would never hand the article to Einar. It was hers; the words of praise were hers. Again, she didn’t feel the need to share.

  But Greta couldn’t just read the review and then fold it away in a drawer. No, she had to react, and so she immediately wrote the critic with an idea.

  “Thank you for your thoughtful review,” she began.

  It will have a special place in my clippings file. Your words were just too kind. I hope you’ll look me up the next time you’re in Copenhagen. Ours is a small city, but refined. Something tells me you haven’t seen it properly. In the meantime, there ’s one more thing I’d like to ask you. My husband, Einar Wegener, the landscapist, has lost track of a close childhood friend. The only thing my husband knows of him is that he lives in Paris and is, perhaps, an art dealer. Would you happen to know him, Hans Axgil, the baron? He’s from Bluetooth, on Jutland. My husband would like to find him. Apparently they were uncommonly close as boys. My husband becomes quite nostalgic—as men do when they recall their youth—when he speaks of Hans and their childhood together in Bluetooth, which is really only a bog. But I thought you might at least know of Hans, since the world of the Arts is smaller than we all think. If you have an address, that would be, again, too kind. Please send it to me, and I’ll be sure to pass it to Einar. He would be grateful.

  CHAPTER Seven

  A week after the Artists Ball, Lili met Henrik in Kongens Have three evenings in a row. Still unsure of herself, she agreed to see him only at dusk, which at the end of June came late after supper. Each night as she dressed, pulling a skirt from the wardrobe, preparing for her assignation, she would become heavy with guilt. Greta would be reading the newspaper in the front room, and Lili could nearly feel Greta’s eye on her as she applied the powder and the lipstick and filled her camisole with rolled socks. Lili would tiptoe around Edvard IV, who was sprawled on the little oval carpet in front of the mirror. Lili would study her profile in the mirror, first from the left, then from the right. She felt sorry about leaving Greta to her newspaper and the cone of light from her reading lamp—but not sorry enough to fail to meet Henrik at the proposed iron streetlamp.

  “Are you going out?” Greta asked the first night Lili headed toward the front door, just as the horn of the Bornholm ferry was calling.

  “For a walk,” Lili said. “For some fresh air. It ’s too nice to be inside.”

  “At this hour?”

  “As long as you don’t mind.”

  “I don’t mind,” Greta said, pointing to the pile of newspapers at her feet that she still wanted to read before going to bed. “But all alone?”

  “I won’t be exactly alone.” Lili couldn’t look at Greta when she said this, her eyes averted to the floor. “I’m meeting Henrik.” And then, “But only for a stroll.”

  Lili watched Greta’s face. Her cheeks were twitching and it seemed as if she was grinding her teeth. Greta sat up in her reading chair. She sharply creased the newspaper in her lap. “Don’t stay out too late,” she finally said.

  Henrik kept Lili waiting nearly twenty minutes beneath the streetlamp. She began to worry that maybe he had changed his mind, that perhaps he had realized something about her. It frightened her, to be alone on the street. But she was also thrilled by the sense of freedom, the rapid pulse in her throat telling her she could do almost anything she pleased.

  When Henrik finally arrived, he was out of breath, sweat on his upper lip. He apologized. “I was painting and lost track of time. Does that ever happen to you, Lili? When you nearly forget who or where you are?”

  They walked for a half hour, in the warm night. They didn’t say much, and it felt to Lili as if there was nothing to say. Henrik took her hand. When they were on a street empty but for a stray dog, he kissed her.

  They met again the next two nights, each time Lili slipping out of the apartment under Greta’s gaze rising above the edge of the newspaper. Each time Henrik arriving late, running, paint beneath his fingernails, splattered in his curls.

  “I’d like to meet Greta someday,” Henrik said. “To prove to her I’m not really the type of man who runs away from a fainting woman.”

  They stayed out late that third night, past the call of the last tram, past one o’clock when the public houses closed. Lili kept her hand in Henrik’s as they walked through the city, looking in the flat black reflection of shop windows, kissing in the dark provided by doorways. She knew she should return to the Widow House, but something in her wanted to stay out forever.

  Lili was sure Greta would be up waiting for her, her eye never having left the front door. But the apartment was dark when Lili got home, and she washed her face and removed her clothes and climbed into bed as Einar.

  The next day Greta told Lili she should stop seeing Henrik. “Do you think it’s fair to him?” she asked. “To deceive him
like this? What do you think he would think?”

  But Lili didn’t quite understand what Greta meant. What would Henrik think about what? Unless Greta plainly told her, often Lili forgot who she was.

  “I don’t want to stop seeing him,” she said.

  “Then please, stop seeing him for me.”

  Lili said she’d try, but even as she said it she knew it would be impossible. As she stood in the front room, by Einar’s empty easel, she knew she was lying to Greta. But Lili couldn’t help it. She could hardly help herself.

  And so Lili and Henrik began to meet secretly, at the end of the afternoon, before it was time for Lili to return home for supper. At first it was difficult for Lili to see Henrik in the daylight, with the sun harsh in her face. She feared he would discover that she wasn’t really beautiful, or worse. She would tie a scarf around her head, the knot beneath her chin. She felt comfortable sitting with him only in the darkened Rialto movie house, her hand in his, or in the hushed library of the Royal Academy, the reading room dimmed by green canvas roller shades.

  One night Lili told Henrik to meet her by the lake in Ørstedsparken at nine o’clock. There were two swans gliding in the water, and a willow leaning toward the grass. Henrik was late, and when he arrived he kissed her forehead. “I know we only have a few minutes,” he said, his hair brushing her throat.

  But Greta was at a reception at the American embassy that night. She would be gone for another few hours, and Lili was about to tell Henrik they could freely dine together at the restaurant with the wainscot walls on Gråbrødre Torv. They could stroll down Langelinie like any other Danish couple out on a fine summer night. She could hardly believe the good news she was about to break to Henrik, who had become used to meeting Lili for twenty minutes at a time. “I have something to tell you,” she said.

  Henrik took her hand and kissed it and then held it against his chest. “Oh, Lili—don’t say any more,” he said. “I already know. Don’t worry about anything, but I already know.” His face was open, his eyebrows lifted.